The issue’s special section on ‘Intimacy Revisited’ features articles that situate dominant understandings of ‘intimacy’ in its associations with sexuality, but then expand to examine intimacy as a much broader empirical issue.

This special issue is motivated by the question of why materiality is so difficult to deal with in terms of research methods. As a whole, the contributions illustrate the variety of research problems in the social sciences to which material agency matters, as well as the methodological challenges included in the empirical investigation of things.